Before Jamestown, Cahokia outnumbered medieval London
The land that became the United States holds tens of thousands of years of Indigenous societies—today including some 575 federally recognized tribes. Long before English settlers founded Jamestown in 1607 or Plymouth in 1620, Mississippian Cahokia near today’s St. Louis may have held about 20,000 people in the twelfth century, larger than London then.
Prevailing models send Paleo-Indians across Beringia from Siberia into Alaska, perhaps as early as 30,000 years ago; by 10,000 BCE humans were well established across North America. Clovis culture (about 9100–8850 BCE) is known for fluted spear points; farming spread north from central Mexico after about 8000 BCE, with corn in Arizona and New Mexico valleys by 3000 BCE. Adena mound-building began around 600 BCE; Hopewell exchange later reached from the Southeast toward Lake Ontario; Mississippians absorbed Hopewellians by about 500 CE. Cahokia centered on Monks Mound, about 100 feet (30 m) tall. In the Southwest, Anasazi pueblos included Mesa Verde’s Cliff Palace and Pueblo Bonito’s roughly 800 rooms; Pacific Northwest peoples organized salmon-centered villages and potlatch feasts.
European colonization from the late fifteenth century onward devastated many Indigenous societies through wars, epidemics, and mass killings. By the 1760s Britain’s Thirteen Colonies were established; Southern agriculture rested on enslaved African labor. After French defeat in the French and Indian Wars, Parliament’s taxes and the 1773 Intolerable Acts inflamed conflict. War opened at Lexington and Concord on 19 April 1775; George Washington took command of the Continental Army that June. Independence was voted on 2 July 1776 and declared on 4 July; Britain recognized sovereignty in the Treaty of Paris on 3 September 1783. The Constitution was signed 17 September 1787 and, with government under it from 4 March 1789, remains the world’s oldest written national constitution still in force; a Bill of Rights followed in 1791.
Westward expansion—Louisiana Purchase (1803), Texas annexation (1845), and Mexican-American War gains sealed by Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848)—intensified slavery fights. Lincoln’s 1860 election preceded Confederate secession and Fort Sumter (April 1861); Gettysburg’s more than 50,000 casualties marked a Union turning point before victory in 1865 and Lincoln’s assassination on 15 April. Reconstruction (1865–77) briefly expanded federal protection of rights before Jim Crow backlash. Industrial Gilded Age power, Progressive reforms, world wars, New Deal Social Security, Cold War rivalry, and the 1960s civil rights struggle remade the republic that emerged from those deeper Indigenous and colonial layers.
Source: History of the United States
